The scale and severity of the Bridelow Bog Burst has caused widespread shock and disbelief, although it was not without precedent.
Such phenomena have occurred infrequently within recorded history, usually after a period of inordinately heavy rainfall when the surface layer of vegetation becomes too weak to retain the liquefied mass of peat beneath.
Several minor bog-slides have been reported in recent decades. After a midsummer thunderstorm in 1963, a peat- slide affected a large area of Meldon Hill bog in the Northern Pennines, leaving two scars in the blanket peat about 230 metres long and 36 metres wide.
Many centuries earlier but closer to the site of our own disaster was the eruption of Chat Moss, near Manchester, which Leland, an historian in the reign of Henry VIII, records as having 'brast up and destroied much grounds and much fresche water fische therabowt and so carried stinking water into the Mersey and carried the roulling mosse to the shores of Wales, part to the Isle of Man and sum into Ireland.'
One cannot but suspect a certain exaggeration in this account. But those of us who experienced the horror of that night, those who lost friends or loved ones or only their homes will carry with them to their own graves the smell, the texture and, for some, the very taste of the black and ancient vegetable matter we call peat.
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):
A tall order, owd lad.
To try and unearth the truth from the Black. To make sense out of what happened. To consider whether my beloved Bridelow has a future. And, if so, what kind.
I thought at first to put it off until after the official Government inquiry, from which there'll obviously be a report for public scrutiny. However, that's not likely to emerge for months, and when it does it's bound to be a dry Civil Service document full of scientific guff and a list of safety recommendations for communities which happen to be situated on the edge of large, unstable peatbogs.
'Ernie,' you said, 'you're the only man who can put all this into any sort of human and historical perspective. You must get it down while it's fresh. Before it becomes part of Bridelow Mythology.'
What you really meant was. While you're still with us, Ernie.
'And who'll read it, owd lad?'
'Let's hope,' you said sadly, 'that nobody outside of Bridelow will ever have to.' So I'm writing this in your study at the Rectory while you're up at the church, conducting your first evensong since the Burst. Thanks to your charity, I've been sleeping (whenever the Lord permits it) in the little spare room it the top of the house.
Emergency accommodation. My own house, exposed up by the school, being one of the first destroyed.
Seemed, when it was happening, like Armageddon: most of what we knew and loved engulfed by a dreadful destructive force… perhaps the merciless anger of the Lord, which we had brought upon ourselves by clinging to our primitive Christian paganism while all those around us (them Across the Moss) had long since been converted and embraced the Light.
Embraced the light? Don't make me laugh. There's more black out there than you'll find in Bridelow even now, under its dark blanket of peat.
Peat preserves.
The Moss preserved the ancient dead and two millennia of fear, violence, sickness and dread. And other things of which we do not speak, of which we cannot speak. Of which Matt Castle, all those years ago, could not speak, only let it pour away, out of the pipes, as he wandered in his agony upon the Moss.
It has absorbed all our overflowing emotions, this Moss, like a gigantic psychic cesspit. It has preserved and it has neutralized. An archaic chemical cathartic.
Ignore me, Hans, I'm getting too deep. Or too whimsy, as Ma Wagstaff would sometimes rebuke me, poor owd lass.
Avoiding getting to the simple physical horror of it.
Thousands of tons of the filthy stuff. Liquefied peat. Stink? I don't think I'll ever get rid of it from the back of my throat. And certainly not from the back of my thoughts. Not as long as I breathe.
Cowering in the choir stalls, we could hear it descending all around the church, still hearing the echo of that cataclysmic thunderclap in aftershocks of rumbling and roaring, and we thought the church would implode, the walls collapse in upon us with a shattering shower of stained glass.
But the church held. The makeshift Autumn Cross swayed and rustled, the lights went out and came on again, bar the one above the door, but the church held.
More than my house did. Reason it went: it was on the wrong side of the street. The first explosion, the actual burst, sent the fountaining filth hundreds of feet into the air… why, bits of it were found on the moor, five or six miles away.
But when it settled into a mere tidal wave – a bit, they say, like the tip slide which killed all those poor kids in South Wales – it was the buildings on the west side of the street that took it: the Post Office, the chip shop, Bibby's General Stores (poor old Gus Bibby couldn't have known a thing; his flat over the shop was filled up in seconds with liquid peat as dark and evil-looking as the comfrey oil in one of Ma Wagstaff's jars).
Naturally, The Man I'th Moss, the most westerly building in the village, on the very edge of the bog, is now under a great morass of muck. Selling it won't be a problem for Lottie Castle now; just a question of collecting the insurance, more than enough for a semi in Wilmslow.
At least thirty people died in the village that night; how many were simply victims of the Bog Burst may never be established. Which is, you will agree, just as well.
Quite a few are believed to have perished instantly out on the Moss, although, again, an exact number will probably never be known. Perhaps, over hundreds of years, the bodies will be disinterred, perfectly preserved no doubt, like our Man. Museum pieces – although perhaps not, because the Burst will be part of recorded history, so people will understand.
Or will they? Do any of us, even now, know precisely what happened, or why?
Except for Dr Roger Hall, who was seen by his assistant, Mrs White, to be heading for the Moss a short time before the Burst, most of those who died out there, in conditions which recall what I've read of the black horrors of the Somme, will remain unidentified. Many were likely to have been men and women long estranged from their families or disowned by their relatives because of the unacceptable practices in which they indulged themselves.
I know very little about so-called 'satanism', whether this is simply a convenient name we have given to those who seek personal power over others through supposedly supernatural means. Whether, as some say, they sacrificed newborn babies out on the moor in order to 'reconsecrate' the stone circle, I certainly don't know that. I do not want to know. All I do know is that extremism of any kind has never taken root in Bridelow, where a practical paganism and a humble Christianity have comfortably linked hands for so long. Many of the dead, sadly, were members of the fundamentalist Christian group called, if I have this right, The Church of the Angels of the New Advent. A large number of them, including their leaders, Mr and Mrs Christopher Montcrieff, heard the mighty thunder-roar and – believing it to be the dawning of the Day of Judgment, as forecast in the Book of Revelations – rushed out of the Rectory into the street with arms and (I would like to think) hearts upraised.
And, in seconds, were buried alive.
Not that many would have remained alive for long under that glutinous mess, most being crushed or drowned or suffocated very rapidly, mouths and noses and lungs clogged for ever. Some of those who did survive had been trapped in pockets of air under beams or walls or other protective bullwarks – although just as many were killed by masonry which was crumbling like crisp toast under the weight of hundreds of tons of peat. The first death, largely overshadowed by what was to come, remains officially unexplained.
The body in the BMW motor car did indeed prove to be that of my old friend Eliza Horridge. There will be an inquest, and it will probably record an Open Verdict, for Liz appears to have died not of injuries sustained in a car accident and the subsequent fire but some hours earlier and of hypothermia, due to exposure.
There is no question that Liz was suffering from an agoraphobia exacerbated by the fear that her presence was no longer welcome in Bridelow following the sale of the brewery to Gannons (I feel, therefore, that none of us who knew her is exempt from blame) and that, fearing the imminent reappearance of her old lover, John Lucas (whom I shall henceforth, to keep him at a distance, refer to by his adopted nom-de-plume of John Peveril Stanage) courageously overcame her illness to seek the aid of her one-time protector, Iris Wagstaff.
And when Ma – who then had herself but a short time left to live – failed to answer her door, Liz, feeling she dare not return home, became confused and wandered out on to the moor. I cannot bring myself to contemplate those cold, wet hours of mental agony and desperation before she succumbed to fatigue and lay down to the sad sleep from which she would never awaken.
I can only assume that her body was discovered on the moor by the sick, satanic brethren recruited by Stanage and his temptress and conveniently employed, most of them, by Gannons. And then (remember, we are not dealing here with wholly rational people) someone decided to put Liz's body into the car, from which they had removed Miss Moira Cairns, before destroying it. As the police could establish no link whatsoever between Liz and Miss Cairns, it was assumed the car had been stolen, but inquiries, I am told, are not yet complete.
As to the part played in this affair by the brewery… Well, its the economic heart of the village, it was obviously a target for someone with malice in mind
I realise now that perhaps the very first death of what we might, quite justifiably, call Bridelow's War, was that of Andy Hodgson, the young worker who 'fell' to the ground during the reassembly of the rusted pulley-and-platform mechanism used originally for winching sacks to the highest level of the brewery… that old malt store which was to become the unholiest of temples.
It is my belief that Andy Hodgson was himself a foundation-sacrifice to consecrate the malt store, in one of several corruptions of Celtic ritual performed in an effort to crumble the edifice of our tradition. The platform was later used, there can be no doubt, to winch up the body of Matt Castle, stolen from its grave for despicable necromantic purposes.
It was early days, though, and Andy's death was clearly less elaborate than that of poor Joel Beard, for whom I shall always have a certain respect, whose body remains buried somewhere out on the Moss, and perhaps far more deeply now than was ever intended.
The brewery, in an eastern corner of the village, much shielded by trees, was unaffected by the Burst. When a certain police officer paid a discreet visit the following morning he did not find what he apparently had been expecting. The remains of Matt Castle and Young Frank Manifold had disappeared.
A mystery? Not, I suspect, much of one. I think, if I were to question a few former regulars of The Man I'th Moss, particularly the estimable Mr Stanley Burrows, I might discover that, in the aftermath of the Burst and all the panic and confusion, the number of bodies in the bog had been surreptitiously supplemented.
The aforementioned policeman, an untypically thoughtful and philosophical officer approaching retirement, wishes it to be recorded that he was not in Bridelow on the night of the disaster and is unlikely to return. Although, I am informed, this officer has been undertaking some private 'stress-counselling' with a certain widow, in his own time. It was to be two days before the other bodies were discovered at the brewery. I shall come to this.
Those of us, including Benjie's dog and Ma's cats, who sought sanctuary in the church remained unharmed, although it was terrifying to feel the building almost rocking around us. Surrounded by rescue-squads in the wan light of early dawn, we could see peat four or five feet deep in parts of the churchyard, like an obscene black parody of snowdrifts.
Most of the graves had disappeared, just the heads of crosses showing. Our Sheila remained in position, looking perhaps more disgruntled than usual with her most public parts gunged up with peat.
Although their yards and gardens were submerged, the houses on the right of the street, had been spared the worst, and these included Ma Wagstaff's cottage, wherein we came upon something inexplicably strange.
Dic Castle was sitting in Ma's old rocking-chair in an atmosphere of unexpected tranquility. He had been brought to the house at his own request after Stan Burrows and a certain policeman had been unable to find Cathy Gruber.
Curiously calm, Dic had insisted they leave him alone, and with so many horrors competing for their attention they didn't argue for long.
And so the lad sat himself down in the rocking chair and slept through all the roaring and the screaming, and he dreamed of an old lady rather irritably bandaging his wounds, continually assuring him that she had better things to do.
I myself have seen those wrists. Now, still within a week, the scars are scarcely visible.
I am a schoolteacher and an historian, a man of facts. I make no comments upon this. The American, Mr Macbeth… Mungo, why not?… could so easily have followed the rest of us into the church and saved himself, but instead displayed exceptional and foolhardy courage.
I doubt if he himself knew whether it was Cathy or Miss Moira Cairns he thought he could save. But in his desperate race down the village street he must have felt himself to be close to the epicentre of an earthquake, drenched by the insidious black liquid, with cobs of semi-solid peat falling like bombs all around him and the crackling roar of collapsing buildings on the western side.
Eventually, the young man reached The Man I'th Moss, and must have been horrified by what he found.
For the pub began with the second storey, its ground floor buried under a black avalanche, the lantern over the front door half submerged but still eerily alight.
Mungo knew the peat would be far too deep to enable him to reach the rear of the building in the normal way, so he waded out to the boundary wall – now no more than a foot above the surface – clambered on to it and moved perilously, like a tightrope walker, around the forecourt until he reached the yard at the rear, at the end of which was the remains of the barn which had been used by Matt Castle for his music.
An ante-room to hell.
… Oh, Jesus… the fuck am I gonna do? I can't handle this. There's nobody alive here. There… is… nobody… alive.
Clawing at his eyes, filling up with the black shit.
And what if I find her body? You expect me to deal with that, Duchess? You sent me down to here to bring her body back, that it? Well, fuck you. Duchess, f…
Hold it.
Voices. Close up.
Maybe these were echoes of voices from before the deluge, peat preserving the last blocked screams of the dying.
'Drop it. Darling… simply drop it. It'll pull you down. Drop the stone – listen to me, now – drop the stone and wade away because – believe this – another four or five paces and you'll be in over your head, and it won't matter. Drop the stone and back away now and save yourself. All you can do, m'dear.'
'Get stuffed!'
Cathy.
Macbeth saw that after the rain, after the blast, there was a lightness in the sky, still night but somehow drained of darkness. A phoney dawn, bringing things and people into visibility.
Cathy was waist-deep in the peat, her fine, fair hair gummed to her skull. She was looking up, but not at the rained-out sky.
Above her, balanced upon a fallen roof-spar, an apparition glowing white, or so it seemed, undamaged by the night or the storm of peat, was the writer, John Peveril Stanage.
Macbeth crouched on his wall.
It was clear that Stanage knew exactly why Cathy was holding, above the level of the peat, a single grey boulder, the kind from which these tough drystone walls had been constructed.
And it was clear also that he believed – part of the psychological mesh he'd helped weave, the mystical dynamic he'd set in motion long ago – that if this boulder should be put in place, in some particular place, he'd be able to proceed no further in the direction of Bridelow.
He believed this.
In the air, a glimmering, light on metal.
Stanage had hold of a length – five feet or so – of copper pipe.
This was not mystical.
Even as Macbeth struggled to his feet, the pipe began to swing.
'No!'
As he fell from the wall, the pipe smashed into Cathy.
Macbeth rolled into three feet of liquid crud and came up like a sheep out of the dip, found it hard to stand upright, the stuff up around his waist and it was so goddamn heavy, filling up the pockets of his slicker; he shrugged out of the slicker, stood there, breathing like a steam engine, black shit soaking into his fucking useless Bloomingdale menswear department cashmere sweater.
'Cathy… where the f…?'
'Who are you?' said Stanage.
Macbeth scraped peat out of his eyes. 'It doesn't matter,' he said.
He heard Cathy spluttering beside him, glanced briefly at her – something oozing out the side of her head, something that wasn't peat. He pushed himself in front of her, slime slurping down the front of his pants; cold as hell.
'Cathy, just do as he says and get outa here, willya."
Cathy's hands came out of the mire with a kind of sucking sound and they were still clutching the grey stone. He saw her grinning, small white teeth in a small blackened face.
'Go!' Macbeth screamed. 'Get the fuck outa here!'
He heard the wafting of the copper pipe through the moist air and he threw himself forward and met it with his body, hard into the chest, and his skin was so cold and numb that if it cracked a rib, or maybe two, he didn't even feel it.
He wrenched hard on the pipe and heard a grunt and then Stanage was tumbling from the end of his roofspar and, breaking the surface of the Moss with a splat, and Macbeth went under. And when he came up, the peat felt a whole lot colder and he couldn't even cough it out of his lungs because of the long fingers like a wire garotte around his throat.
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished): Mungo Macbeth having instructed her, in his distressingly restricted New York parlance, to remove herself, Cathy realized she had little choice but to do as he said. The girl cannot swim – even if anyone could in liquid of this consistency and temperature – and her only hope was to get help.
You must remember that Cathy was in a state of some bewilderment; she had not seen the bog burst, only heard the thunder roar, and, like most of us, could have had no concept of the scale of the devastation.
But the village must have looked very different, shockingly so, with the converted gaslamps on one side of the street protruding no more than a few feet from the murky surface of what had now become an extension of the Moss.
And the poor girl must have been appalled by the sight of the collapsed cottages, the telephone box protruding from the peat like a buoy and the Post Office in ruins behind it.
She waded frantically back to the wall, placed the grey stone on top, hauled herself up after it and sat there a while, shattered by what she had seen and half-stunned by the blow from the pipe which had landed on her shoulder and rebounded on to the side of her head. She knew there was blood there, mingling with the rivulets of peatwater from her hair, but she did not touch the wound, preferring to remain ignorant of its extent and severity so long as she could function.
Cathy tells me – rather ashamed – that her mind at this point had simply blanked out Mungo Macbeth and what might be happening to him at the cold hands of John Peveril Stanage. She sat on the wall, with the grey stone on her knees. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond fatigue, beyond thought… even beyond prayer.
And when all feeling had gone, apart from a sense of failure and despair, something came to her.
Now…
Problems.
It is not my place to be credulous and speak of 'vision'. Nor would I wish to use the clinically dismissive term 'hallucination'.
Of course, I have read the stories, the 'eyewitness testimony', from Lourdes to Fatima to Knock and Walsingham, and occasionally I have been impressed and heartened but most times left cold and more than a little sceptical.
I have heard of similar eyewitness reports from the edge of bubbling streams in the Peak District of Derbyshire and – yes – from our own Holy Well above Bridelow. And these have not been chronicled at all, for, in the view of devout Roman Catholics, Our Lady is hardly considered to be the same figure as Their 'lady', although both have been 'seen' to shine with a silvery aureole, as of the moon rather than the sun.
Well. Cathy's Lady – you'll laugh, or perhaps you won't – wore a duffel coat.
She appeared to be sitting next to the lass on the wall. She was not beautiful, Cathy says, but her aura of feminine grace was so powerfully calming that the air became still and soft and moist, and even the rugged stones beneath her felt like cushions.
She remembers hanging her head, her chin upon her chest, and the lady stroking her hair. Or at least it was stroked.
About the duffel coat.
My researches tell me that the priests and priestesses of Ancient Britain – the shaman class, if you will – would usually be attired for ceremonial purposes in a loose, hooded garment of blue wool. Quite when the duffel coat, as we know it, reappeared I don't know; my knowledge of social history has never extended to fashion trends, but it has always struck me as curiously meaningful that, while most coats are fastened with plastic buttons or zips, the duffel is secured by pegs of wood. Or (even more interesting) of horn. But I digress.
The next thing Cathy remembers is standing at a point halfway between the end of the pub forecourt and the first of the ruined cottages. The peat was up to her knees.
Our Lady of the Duffel Coat was gone.
And so was the stone.
Cathy says she felt nothing; neither relief nor the old despair. She was an empty vessel. It was not until later that she would recall the lady in any supernatural sense. She had been as real as the stone, which Cathy had no memory of depositing.
Now there was only the practical problem of avoiding death on the drowning side of the village.
The Beacon of the Moss was alight again, courtesy of Alf Beckett and his floodlight. It threw a strange glimmer on the black surface of a new river flowing between great banks of peat down the middle of the street. From out of a mound of peat, a stiffened arm protruded, the fingers curled and black.
From behind her, Cathy heard voices. She turned her back on the street and waded towards the sound, coming at last to the most southerly part of the village which ran down to the Moss near the causeway and where, she remembered, Lottie Castle was to have placed her stone.
It was here that Cathy became the last person to see Shaw Horridge and Therese Beaufort – later formally identified as one Tessa Byford – alive.
The effects of the Burst at this southern point were somewhat less marked. Although the Moss had overflowed the causeway in places (which was to cause serious delays for the rescue service vehicles) it had not reached a life-threatening depth for an adult.
The man and woman were thigh-deep at the edge of the causeway, and Cathy was about to call out to them when she realized who they were. Lady Strychnine, as she'd referred to Therese, was hissing at Shaw to get back and leave her and attempting to disengage his hand from around her wrist. Shaw, it appeared, was trying to drag her back towards the village and laughing in a voice which Cathy has described to me as surprisingly coarse and cruel.
'Come on,' Shaw was shouting, almost gleefully. 'Come back. You can do it. You'll feel so much better.'
He kept repeating this phrase, hitting her with it, Cathy says, and pulling at her arm, and Therese was screaming shrilly and at one stage actually vomiting with fear.
'Lottie's stone, you see,' Cathy is telling me. 'Therese couldn't go past the stone.' And it was then that I realized' – Cathy shakes her head in incomprehension – 'that it had worked. That we'd done it. That the Bridelow Mothers' Union was able to function.'
And knowing what she knew about the woman (not half of what we now know) Cathy felt no great pity when Shaw Horridge quickly let go of Therese's wrists and suddenly delivered an enormous blow to her face with his fist.
All this time Cathy had been backing away up the street towards the village centre, and she turned around just once to see Shaw Horridge walking very slowly and deliberately up the street with Therese's slender body hanging limply from his arms. As I recorded earlier, it was two days before the corpses were found. This happened when an executive of Gannons accompanied the company's insurance assessor into the brewery to see what minor damage had occurred.
They would hardly have bothered to go into the malt loft even it had not been firmly locked and no keys apparent. As it was, they progressed no further than the second level where the 'coppers' stand.
These are the huge tanks in which the 'wort', as the initial preparation is known, is mixed with the hops (or bog myrtle in old Bridelow Brewery days) which preserve the beer and give it that all-important bitter quality.
It appeared that Shaw, quite methodically, had lit the oil- boiler and gone about the beer-making process on his own, something which, to my own knowledge, he had been able to do since the age of twelve under the paternal eye of Arthur Horridge.
The operation must have taken Shaw several hours, by which time the village was teeming with urgent life: fire and ambulance personnel, moorland rescue teams, television crews; at least two helicopters overhead. I wonder, what state was Therese in during this period? Was she conscious? Did she know what was to happen? Was she – already forcibly conveyed beyond a boundary which she had been psychologically incapable of crossing unassisted – in any state to object?
The copper, by the way, is also known as the 'brew kettle' because in it the hops are boiled into the wort preparatory to the addition of yeast.
They say the insurance assessor passed out after finding the bodies of Shaw and Therese, which must have boiled for nearly two hours before the boiler, reaching danger-level, had automatically cut out.
Was this, I wonder, another example – drowning, boiling and perhaps, in Therese's case, simultaneous strangulation – of that ancient mystery, the Celtic Triple Death?
What was Shaw's state of mind? Was he angry? Embittered? Remorseful? Or a dangerous brew of all three?
Tell me,' I ask Cathy. 'When you heard them on the edge of the Moss, was Shaw stuttering, as he used to do? You know… You'll fer-fer-feel ber-ber-better?'
'No,' she says. 'I'm pretty sure he wasn't.'
'I'm glad,' I say. Poor Mungo.
His larynx full of peat, his eyes staring up in terminal terror into the eyes of the madman Stanage, his mouth no doubt full of flip New York obscenities which he now knew he would never utter.
Poor lad.
The stranger in a strange land. Thrown upon the Scottish shore with the instruction, I am told, to discover his 'roots'.
By 'eck. How gullible some of these Americans are apt to be.
And the winds of fate… nay, the typhoons of fate, can sometimes pick you up and put you down precisely where you wanted to be. Only when you look around, do you realise it's the very last place you wanted to be.
He found his Celtic roots, all right. We might not wear kilts or speak a different language or owt like that, but I reckon we've been closer in Bridelow to the true Celtic way – Shades of things, Ernest! (Aye, thank you, Ma) – than you'll find in any lonely hamlet in Sutherland or Connemara. And I think it will survive. I think the Mothers will watch over the rebuilding of a stronger Bridelow, I doubt they'll ever again 'let things slide'.
Cathy won't let them.
Did you know, Hans, by the way, that your daughter was coming to the end of her second and final year at a very reputable theological college outside Oxford? I bet you didn't. I bet she just kept telling you she was doing 'post-graduate research' or something of that order.
But Ma Wagstaff knew. Ma Wagstaff spoke more than once of the 'one who'll come after me' and everybody laughed because it sounded so quaintly biblical.
They have a fund, you know, the Mothers. A bank account in Glossop or Macclesfield or somewhere, to which unexpected windfalls and bequests are added from time to time, and there was sufficient money in that to put Cathy through theological college without anyone knowing.
If all goes well, it'll be The Reverend Cathy soon. And in a few years, all things being equal, Bridelow will have its first woman minister. Oh, aye. You can count on it. You really think the Archdeacon won't give us his full backing in ensuring that the lass is appointed? By 'eck, lad, we've got enough dirt on that bugger to buy his soul off him, and we're not afraid to use it!
Makes you think though, doesn't it. Another giant step for mankind in little Bridelow: probably the first official Anglican clergy person (as we'll have to say) equipped to serve both God and the Goddess.
By 'eck. Could've given Macbeth twenty-five years at least, this bastard, his face white as a skull, white as the skulls that tumbled from the walls in the Earl's Castle so long ago, in another time, another life.
But so goddamn strong. His hands so hard, so tight around Macbeth's throat that Macbeth figured one finger must have been driven, nail first, through the skin, through the flesh and up his windpipe where it had lodged and swollen to the size of a clenched fist.
He fought to breathe, but there was no air left, not anywhere in the world.
Stanage's eyes had receded into his skull as he thrust Macbeth's head down under the water once, twice. Second time he came up, Macbeth's eyes were popping too far out, probably, for eyelids to cover, and he was seeing nothing through the black water. Only his inner eyes saw everything, with a helpless clarity:
… this is how it happens, this is how you drown.
His lungs hard as concrete, his whole body filled up with peat.
… gonna be preserved. For all time. For ever.
'I remember you now,' he heard Stanage saying. 'Scotland, yes? An American. Followed the Cairns creature around like a bloody lamb.'
Stanage must have known the last question, the one Macbeth couldn't speak, the one which even his blacked-out eyes could no longer convey.
He said, almost gently, 'She died.'
And Macbeth stopped resisting, surrendered to the limitless night.
'Bloody unfortunate, really. Didn't want her dead at a crucial stage. But it'll be OK, I suppose; she won't be doing much yet. They're very bewildered, you see, m'boy. At first. It can take about three days – well, weeks, months, years in some cases. Oh, she was doubtless better prepared than most, but however developed they are, it's three days, minimum, 'fore they can do damage.'
Stanage wore a black jacket over a white shirt. The shirt was spotless; suddenly this was the worst thing, a spiritual travesty; Macbeth, dying, felt sick at the injustice of it.
'Caught her unawares, I think, when it came, m'boy. Even though she certainly did have a spirit. Damn well caught me unawares on one occasion, as you saw. Bitch. But the Scottish business, that was really…'
Forcing Macbeth under the dark water again; this time no struggle, get it over…
But Stanage brought him up again.
'… just a small clash of egos, in comparison. Small clash of egos. This, though… this is a splendid shake-up. Past and present, worlds colliding…'
Macbeth's eyes cleared a moment; he saw a big yellow grin.
'… roof coming in, I was expecting it, threw myself under a table. Central beam – oak beam – came down on her. If she'd had all her hair – ironic, really – I wouldn't have seen it happen. Not in quite such exquisite detail… crrrrunch. Like an eggshell.'
Eased his grip a fraction, so that a thin jet of air entered Macbeth's lungs. He used it.
'Motherfucker.'
Stanage laughed. 'What? Lord, no. You ever see my mother?'
Closed up Macbeth's throat.
'Fucked a sister or two. That was fun. For a while. Strengthens the old family ties. Goodnight, m'boy. Don't suppose your passing will cause much of a vibe on the ether.'
Last thing Macbeth saw, with gratitude, was some dark shit on Stanage's shirt.
Must've sprayed it out with 'motherfucker'. From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished): They haven't found his body and happen they never will.
Peat preserves.
Oh, aye, it does that. But how much of what peat preserves should be preserved?
It's not natural, that's the problem. Dust to dust. All things must pass. All things must rot. For in rotting there's change. That's the positive aspect of physical death. All things must change.
Nothing changes much in the peat; so peat, in my view, works against natural laws. Living on the edge of it, Bridelow folk have always been aware of the borderline between what is natural and what isn't.
This is not whimsy. But all the same, I've had a bellyful, so I've decided, on balance, that I won't die here. Happen my soul'll find its way back, who can say? But, the Lord – and Willie Wagstaff – decided one rainy night that the peat was not for me, so I'm taking the hint and I'll pop me clogs somewhere else, thank you very much.
Also, to be realistic, I think I need what time's left to me to do a bit of thinking, and I reckon Bridelow is too powerful a place right this minute to get things into any sort of perspective.
So.
I'm off to Bournemouth, owd lad.
Don't you dare say owt. And don't anybody panic either; when I say Bournemouth, I mean Bournemouth – I've a cousin runs a little guest house up towards Poole Harbour. Your Cathy says she'll come and see me and bring Milly, and they'll try their hand at a spot of the old Bridelow healing. 'Doctors!' Cathy says. 'What do they know?'
Aye. What do the buggers know?
We'll see. He could taste the peat on her face. Nothing ever tasted as good. He wanted to believe it. He didn't.
Wherever she goes, that young woman, she's bound to be touched with madness.
He thought, If we're both dead maybe I got a chance this side.
'I…'
'Don't talk. Not if it hurts.'
There was light in the sky; this time maybe the real thing: dawn.
All Souls Day.
His ass was wet. Everything was wet.
No.
The Duchess said. Now, who is the white man?
'No!' Macbeth screamed. 'Fuck you. Duchess!'
'She won't take too kindly to that.'
'No,' he said. 'Please. No tricks. No more tricks.' He opened his eyes. Shut them tight again. 'Stanage, you motherf-'
'He's gone. Believe me. He's the other side. He can't get across. Whether he's alive or dead, he can't get across.'
Macbeth opened his eyes. Kept them open. Kept staring and staring.
'Eggshell,' he said. 'Said her head was smashed like an eggshell.'
'Whose head?'
'Yours? When the roof came in?'
'I hope not,' Moira said, putting a hand for the first time to the remains of her hair. She wrinkled her nose. 'But I sure as hell kept bloody still underneath that beam until he'd gone. Can you walk? I mean, can you stand up?'
Macbeth leaned his back against the wall and did some coughing. Coughed his guts up. Felt better. Not a whole lot better, and the way his goddamn heart was beating…
He got his eyes to focus on her.
'Are you real?'
'Do I no' look real?'
Her slashed hair was in spikes. Her face was streaked with black peat and blood. He couldn't tell what she was wearing except for peat.
'Uh… yeah,' he said. 'I guess you look real. 'And I… Did we come through this?'
'Come on,' Moira said. 'We need to move.'
Holding on to each other, Macbeth still feeling like he was dream-walking, they made it back across the forecourt to where the peat came no higher than their thighs.
And then Moira's plastic lamp went out, which seemed to bother her a lot. 'Just hang on, Mungo, thing's coming to pieces.'
'That's OK.' His brain felt like it was muffled. Mossy. 'We don't need a light any more. Sun's here. Someplace.'
Figured that even if she walked away from him at the top of the street, even if she walked away for ever, he had all the light he'd ever need.
'No,' Moira stopped. 'Been through a lot, me and this lamp. There's blood on it. Is it mine, or Stanage's?'
Macbeth panicked then. He spun around in the peat, saw the roof of The Man I'th Moss, the caved-in roof of the barn, spars and serrated masonry projecting jaggedly into the half- light.
'He's gone,' Moira said.
'You sure he's gone? How can you be sure? Someone like that, he can go that easy?'
He stared down into the peat, like a pair of hands might break and drag him down. Or even worse, if there were hands down there, underneath…
'Please God…' Macbeth breathed as a hand went around his arm.
'It's OK, Mungo.'
'Is it? Is it OK? Are you still real? Oh, Jesus…'
He started to weep.
'Mungo,' Moira said. 'Wasny that easy.' Clawing at his hard, white face, at his nose, his teeth, going at him like a madwoman. Blood oozing, greasy, warm blood. And once I saw his eyes, never really seen his eyes before.
In his eyes is this, like, languorous amusement. The damage I'm doing is superficial, and he's laughing at me.
Behind him, there's a shadow on the moss. The shadow isn't moving.
Behind me…
This warm breath on my neck. I don't even have to turn around to know how putrid this breath is. Death-room breath.
But I do turn around. I turn my back on John Peveril Stanage, and Matt Castle is there.
Man Castle is crouching on the Moss. He is very still, still as stone. Still as the bounding toadstone on the moor before it leaps.
His feet do not touch the peat. He's maybe five yards away but I can smell his breath. He is breath, all breath, a mist on the Moss. He's in his element is Matt Castle. 'I don't remember this,' Mungo said. 'I don't remember any of it.'
'These things sometimes happen out of time, you know?' Moira looked up at where the Beacon of the Moss shone down, not blue, somehow pale gold, like an early sun. 'In a twinkling.'
She looked down at the plastic lamp, its back piece hanging off where you put the batteries in. 'Dic gave me this when he rescued me from the outhouse. It's just a wee, cheap thing, made in Taiwan, where the flu comes from. It had gone out, and then it came on, and when it came on Matt's… essence, spirit… began to squirm, like Dic was sending him a message, you know? And I turned around and…'
… the light shines in the eyes of John Peveril Stanage and Stanage backs off, backs off too far. He's starting to scream – agony, bitter frustration, and somehow I'm hitting him with the light, the finest, brightest light ever came out of Taiwan… and his eyes are this orangey colour floating further back, further away, like the diminishing tail lights of a car disappearing into the night… 'Kept hitting him with the light, Mungo, but he'd gone over. Gone out of the Bridelow circle. Maybe a couple of feet was all it took. Like an electric fence, you know? Shock just hurled him back. Maybe he drowned. Was no' my problem.'
She was still fiddling with the lamp, trying to put it back together.
'And then there was just the two of us. You puking your guts out, Mungo. I don't know what happened. Maybe we're talking Providence, maybe… Here, hold on to this a wee minute.'
She gave him the plastic base and two batteries fell out and plopped into the peat. Then something else fell out after them and she caught it.
What this was, Macbeth saw, was a little metal comb. Like a dog comb with a whole bunch of teeth missing.
'Dic' Moira stared at the comb. 'He stole it back. He told me, but I…'
Moira Cairns started to laugh. Mungo Macbeth never heard anyone sound quite so elated. Laughing fit to cause ripples in the peat. Laughing enough to bring on another goddamn bog blow-out.
She fell down in the swirling street with a filthy splash and she dragged him down on top of her, both arms around his neck, the comb in one hand, and she was kissing him hard on the mouth and the peat on her lips tasted like maple syrup.
When eventually they came to their feet, she linked her arm into his and started to lead him along the western side of the street to where the Beacon of the Moss flashed a tired signal to the sun. The black peat was quite deep around them, but it was feeling cool, now, and good.
'Tea break's over,' she said, turning towards him, the peat around her lips. And she started to laugh again, in lovely big peals. 'Teabreak's over, boys. Back to your tunnelling, yeah?'
Mungo Macbeth said, 'Huh?'
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished): Hans.
Before I go…
I can understand your feelings about the death of the young farmer, Sam Davis, but I don't think you should blame yourself; from what you've told me he was a headstrong lad and if he'd listened to you in the first place he'd have left well alone and might be alive today.
Easy for me to say, but it's what I believe.
And at least his stories of night activity among the circles on the moor were our pointer to the location of the bog body.
It was obvious what they would do with him: switch him from the sanctity of the churchyard to the poisoned earth of a once-holy place which had systematically, over a long period, been reconsecrated in the name of evil.
Cold storage. Nowhere colder.
The policeman, I understand, expected to find him in the loft at tile brewery, but his body was never taken there. I suspect that even Stanage knew that his ancient spirit would be impossible to confront unless it was diffused through Matt Castle. Matt Castle, who they thought they could command. We are all so stupid, are we not, to believe that anything beyond the physical can ever truly be controlled by mankind?
So we all went up there, that's me and the Mothers and a few lads to do the labouring. Went by day, stroke of noon, with as much brightness in the sky as anyone has a right to expect this time of year.
You know, that place still reeks so much of evil that it could be an environmental and spiritual menace for centuries. I don't know what they'll be able to do about that.
Anyroad, Willie Wagstaff and Stan Burrows went in and dug up the bogman and dumped him in a wheelbarrow, and we brought him back to Bridelow.
Where he now lies in what I think you will agree is a place of ultimate safety.
No witch bottle. We didn't want to insult her.